If we find a mentor in this life, a trusted confidant that can guide us in matters great and small, a careful, unjudging, unflinching, kind and generous sort who is well-versed in numerous subjects then we have found a great gift.
Robert Parker is my mentor. No, not just a mentor in wine, but a mentor in a number of subjects. You see, he is causing me to look beyond the glass and do research into fields I would have previously considered uninteresting—the fruits of southeast Asia, botany, toast of French origin, and other vast fecundities of modern life …
As some matter of happenstance, similar to finding Parker as my mentor, my wife and I recently took a jaunt over to Cincinnati, OH to go to an International supermarket—emphasis on “super” as this place, Jungle Jim’s, is about 10,000 square feet and has just about every imaginable international food you can imagine and thousands that you didn’t imagine.
It was at Jungle Jim’s that I found canned lychees in the Asian section—my first time ever seeing this elusive fruit. It was kind of like seeing Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster or a Unicorn. I’ve heard about Lychee’s so often, seen pictures even, but they existed only in mythology, never appearing in a tangible form. I was familiar with Lychee’s because of my mentor, Parker.
I’ve had this mild pet peeve for years with some of the descriptors used in tasting notes that use reference points that border on the absurd. The Wine Advocate, in particular, is educational to me not for the insight into producers and wines that deserve my attention, it’s educational because I have to figure out what the hell some of the notes Parker picks up are and where they come from.
Lychee’s (or “Litchi’s” as the US FDA refers to the fruit) is a fruit that is native to Southeast Asia and is grown very selectively and rarely in California, Florida and Hawaii. In my estimation, maybe, at the best, 10% of wine drinkers have ever enjoyed a lychee in order to use it as a reference point.
Ahem. I’m cracking that club.
When I expectantly opened the can I was somewhat disappointed. Lychee’s, in case you have never had one, look like oversized pearl onions with a texture that is similar. They taste, however, like pears … so this is what Parker is always referencing.
Mystery solved. Not that big of deal. Kind of like how frog legs taste like chicken. I might just say it has some pear notes and call it a day.
I had another epiphany, too. Parker, in addition to having one of the finest palates in modern wine history, also is something of a botanist. I mean, I understand the reference to pain grille—sure, if I’m a Francophile using a fancy word for toast makes some sense to me; same for camphor as a descriptor to describe some earthy sweetness. But, Parker described the Abreu Cabernet Sauvignon Thorevilos as having notes of Acacia Flowers.
Acacia Flowers, for the same uninitiated folks who have never had a Lychee, is, according to Wikipedia, a flowering shrub:
There are roughly 1300 species of Acacia worldwide, about 950 of them native to Australia, with the remainder spread around the dry tropical to warm-temperate regions of both hemispheres, including Africa, southern Asia, and the Americas.
Kudos to Parker for his depth of knowledge on all sorts of things scent related. Little did I know that Parker, in addition to educating me on wine, would also provide me a liberal arts education and mentorship delivered six times a year on parchment colored paper with black ink.
I’m still working on “forest floor,” however.